Interview: Jon Plowman, BBC head of comedy (Evening Standard)
By David Rowan
Jon Plowman has an incontinence problem. Not personally, you understand - although the wry head of BBC comedy does rather enjoy his conversation-halting double-entendres, such as his unsolicited confession to having slept with the Tiger Aspect chairman Peter Bennett-Jones (an innocently shared bedroom on a US business trip, apparently, but one which Plowman delights in presenting as a tabloid "telly chief" exposé).
No, the urinary disorder causing trouble today is that afflicting the Little Britain character Mrs Emery, recently seen relieving herself over a supermarket floor. "Urinary incontinence is not a joke," complained the Royal College of Physicians, furious that a debilitating condition was being mocked. So how better to begin an interview than to give Plowman an opportunity to apologise?
"Ha ha ha," he replies, perhaps not treating the matter with the respect befitting a senior BBC executive. "There's also a woman claiming she has become pregnant because she decided she should become a chav like Vicky Pollard," [whose character comically misunderstands the nature of contraception]. "Well, I'm sorry, it's a man in drag. Does that make any sense? You can't blame TV comedy for the world's ills."
Plowman should know. As a BBC comedy producer since 1986, he is probably responsible for more hits than any other senior television executive. His credits, as producer or executive producer, offer an impressive history of modern British comedy, from A Bit of Fry And Laurie and French and Saunders to Absolutely Fabulous and The Vicar of Dibley. For the past decade, he has also been in charge of developing all in-house TV comedy, including The Office, The League of Gentlemen and Little Britain. Victor Lewis-Smith, the Standard's famously acerbic critic, goes as far as calling him a "comedy God".
But if that power demands responsibility, Plowman, 52, sees his duty simply as to caricature the world. "We're not saying we're trying to make society better, but if a show works, it's because people recognise exaggerated cartoon versions of what's already out there," he says in an office strewn with Baftas and British Comedy Awards. "If From Ab Fab to Little Britain, head of comedy Jon Plowman has produced some of the biggest hits of the past 20 years. Here he reveals why he takes humour so seriously government is really like The Thick of It, then, yes, we have a bit of a problem."
He works, he explains, by choosing scripts that instinctively make him laugh, and then by keeping to a few basic rules. "Comedy is about character, not jokes," he says. "Don't have too many characters. And each character's relationship to each other should be different - Patsy's relationship to Edina is different from Edina's with her mother, and so on - as that will give you friction, which is what comedy is about. There's also a point in most scripts where you should put the car in reverse - just when the audience can see what's going to happen, surprise them. John Cleese famously said that jokes are a derailed train. Well, part of what I'm here to do is derail that train."
Does he regret not cashing in by joining the independent sector? "Yes, of course, you look at the amount Talkback got sold for [£62 million] and think, 'Didn't I make five pretty successful series for them?' On the other hand, I've got a guaranteed output, I can encourage new things as well as old, and I haven't got to worry that the next show might be the one that undoes the company. And this is a great place to find out whether your sense of humour is shared by the nation."
The BBC insists that his role has not diminished since it recently appointed Lucy Lumsden as the first controller of comedy commissioning. Plowman continues to "head up" in-house TV and radio productions, which must then be commissioned by individual channels. I'm a little lost, I tell him. "You're lost ...," he says, before adding that "theoretically it's a collegiate thing where we discuss with Lucy at a comedy board what we should be offering the channels". It all sounds very BBC. Still, Plowman is quick to distance himself from the work of colleagues commissioning shows from outside: mention of Nighty Night and Tittybangbang provokes a swift "Not my show".
. . . ARTICLE CONTINUES HERE . . .
Jon Plowman has an incontinence problem. Not personally, you understand - although the wry head of BBC comedy does rather enjoy his conversation-halting double-entendres, such as his unsolicited confession to having slept with the Tiger Aspect chairman Peter Bennett-Jones (an innocently shared bedroom on a US business trip, apparently, but one which Plowman delights in presenting as a tabloid "telly chief" exposé).
No, the urinary disorder causing trouble today is that afflicting the Little Britain character Mrs Emery, recently seen relieving herself over a supermarket floor. "Urinary incontinence is not a joke," complained the Royal College of Physicians, furious that a debilitating condition was being mocked. So how better to begin an interview than to give Plowman an opportunity to apologise?
"Ha ha ha," he replies, perhaps not treating the matter with the respect befitting a senior BBC executive. "There's also a woman claiming she has become pregnant because she decided she should become a chav like Vicky Pollard," [whose character comically misunderstands the nature of contraception]. "Well, I'm sorry, it's a man in drag. Does that make any sense? You can't blame TV comedy for the world's ills."
Plowman should know. As a BBC comedy producer since 1986, he is probably responsible for more hits than any other senior television executive. His credits, as producer or executive producer, offer an impressive history of modern British comedy, from A Bit of Fry And Laurie and French and Saunders to Absolutely Fabulous and The Vicar of Dibley. For the past decade, he has also been in charge of developing all in-house TV comedy, including The Office, The League of Gentlemen and Little Britain. Victor Lewis-Smith, the Standard's famously acerbic critic, goes as far as calling him a "comedy God".
But if that power demands responsibility, Plowman, 52, sees his duty simply as to caricature the world. "We're not saying we're trying to make society better, but if a show works, it's because people recognise exaggerated cartoon versions of what's already out there," he says in an office strewn with Baftas and British Comedy Awards. "If From Ab Fab to Little Britain, head of comedy Jon Plowman has produced some of the biggest hits of the past 20 years. Here he reveals why he takes humour so seriously government is really like The Thick of It, then, yes, we have a bit of a problem."
He works, he explains, by choosing scripts that instinctively make him laugh, and then by keeping to a few basic rules. "Comedy is about character, not jokes," he says. "Don't have too many characters. And each character's relationship to each other should be different - Patsy's relationship to Edina is different from Edina's with her mother, and so on - as that will give you friction, which is what comedy is about. There's also a point in most scripts where you should put the car in reverse - just when the audience can see what's going to happen, surprise them. John Cleese famously said that jokes are a derailed train. Well, part of what I'm here to do is derail that train."
Does he regret not cashing in by joining the independent sector? "Yes, of course, you look at the amount Talkback got sold for [£62 million] and think, 'Didn't I make five pretty successful series for them?' On the other hand, I've got a guaranteed output, I can encourage new things as well as old, and I haven't got to worry that the next show might be the one that undoes the company. And this is a great place to find out whether your sense of humour is shared by the nation."
The BBC insists that his role has not diminished since it recently appointed Lucy Lumsden as the first controller of comedy commissioning. Plowman continues to "head up" in-house TV and radio productions, which must then be commissioned by individual channels. I'm a little lost, I tell him. "You're lost ...," he says, before adding that "theoretically it's a collegiate thing where we discuss with Lucy at a comedy board what we should be offering the channels". It all sounds very BBC. Still, Plowman is quick to distance himself from the work of colleagues commissioning shows from outside: mention of Nighty Night and Tittybangbang provokes a swift "Not my show".
. . . ARTICLE CONTINUES HERE . . .
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